router

For the past two months I have been trying to set up my home network so that my fedora system would be a router that would let my mandrake system connect to the internet via dialup ppp through the fedora system. I wanted this so that the mandrake system could directly connect to the internet for updates and so forth. My mandrake system has a winmodem and I do not want to spend the $50 for a real modem for this system.

I have several books that describe how to set up a router and the moost complete set of instructions for a fedora system is in the fedora 2 bible. I carefully followed the instructions but I could not get the router functionality to work. When I was playing with webmin, I noticed that the routd daemon was not running so I turned it on and then the router functionality worked. In all the books I have, several specific to network administration, none made mention of the need to have routd running.

webmin

Last night I installed webmin on my Mandrake and Fedora systems and it is much improved over the version available several years ago. It is worth a try.

good cook books

Two books titled Linux Cookbooks have been recently published. The one published by nostarch is a very good book, especially for the novice Linux user. It has a lot of very helpfull techniques and is well worth getting. The other, published by O'Reilly Press, is a bit more advanced than the nostarch one and is more for the intermediate Linux user / system administrator and is also very much worth getting. While there is some overlap between the two books, there is a lot of stuff in each one that is not covered in the other.

The nice thing with both these books is that they tell you how to get usefull stuff done and show you how to do it in detail. They provide quick reference to how to get the day to day stuff done and how to fix usual problems. Both are written by persons who have lots of hands on experience and can communicate well.

thunderbird and gpg

I installed thunderbird 1.0 last night on y Linux box. I then installed the enigmail extention that uses gpg for encryption and signing and it all worked well. In the prior release of Thunderbird I could not get enigmail to install properly, but it all went well this time. I tested all the main features and I had no problems.

more failure

Over the past few days I have been trying to get two different aol dialers to work with my fedora system. I have tried to get linspire's los-aol dialer to work but I get error messages from the python script that the kdecore module is missing. I have also tried to get penggy (an oss aol dialer) to run but it says that libguile.so.6 and libqthread.so.0 are missing. I have downloaded and put these shared modules in /usr/lib and in /lib but I still get the same messages - I don't understand why. I have learned a lot but I still can't get these things to work, but I will keep trying.